At the Wolf's Table Page 4

  The following paragraphs were crossed out. The lines covering the sentences to render them illegible disturbed me. I tried to decipher the words, but to no avail. And yet today I no longer know what to think, Gregor had written. He usually avoided writing compromising things, fearing the mail was opened and censored. His letters were brief—so brief that at times they seemed cold. The dream he’d had must have made him lose control, later forcing him to cross it out, and violently so; in some places the lines had torn through the page.

  Gregor never dreamed, or so he claimed, and he used to tease me because of the importance I attributed to my dreams, almost as though they had revelatory power. He was worried about me, that was why he had written such a melancholy letter. For a moment I imagined the front would send me back a different man and I wondered if I would be able to bear it. I was shut up in the very room where he had dreamed as a little boy but I didn’t know his childhood dreams, and being surrounded by what had once belonged to him wasn’t enough to make him feel close. It wasn’t like when we used to share a bed in our rented apartment and he would fall asleep on his side, arm outstretched to clasp my wrist. Reading in bed, as always, I would turn the pages of my book with only one hand so as not to detach myself from his grasp. At times he flinched in his sleep, his fingers tightening around my wrist as though some spring mechanism had been triggered, and then relaxing again. Who could he cling to now?

  One night my arm grew stiff and I wanted to change positions. Gently, trying not to wake him, I pulled my hand free. His fingers curled up around nothing, grasped empty space. At the sight of it, all the love I felt for him had risen to my throat.

  It’s strange to know you’re at my parents’ house without me there as well. I’m not one to get emotional, yet recently it’s happened to me when I imagine you wandering the rooms, touching the old furniture I grew up with, making jam with my mother. (Thank you for sending me some. Give a kiss to her for me, and tell my father I say hello.)

  I need to sign off now. Tomorrow morning I wake at five. The Katyusha organ plays around the clock, but we’ve grown used to it. Survival, Rosa, is all a matter of chance. Don’t worry, though—by now I can tell from the whistle of the bullets whether they’ll fall close by or far away. Besides, there’s a superstition that I’ve learned in Russia: it says that as long as your woman is faithful, soldier, you’ll never be killed. So I suppose I have no choice but to count on you!

  To make up for my prolonged silence I’ve written quite a bit, so I hope you find no reason for complaint. Tell me about your days. I simply can’t imagine a woman like you living in the countryside! You’ll get used to it soon enough. You’ll like it, you’ll see. Tell me about this job of yours, too. You said you would describe it to me in person, that it was better not to do so by letter. Have I reason to be concerned?

  I’ve saved the best for last, a surprise: I’ll be coming home on leave for Christmas and staying for ten days. We’ll celebrate together, for the first time, in the place where I grew up, and I can’t wait to kiss you.

  The letter in my hands, I rose from the bed and reread it. I wasn’t mistaken, he really had written it. Gregor was coming to Gross-Partsch!

  I look at your photograph every day. Since I always keep it in my pocket, it’s getting awfully worn. It now has a crease that crosses your cheek like a wrinkle. When I return you’ll have to give me another one, because in this one you look older. You know what I say, though? You’re even beautiful old.

  Gregor

  “Herta!” I rushed out of the room, waving the letter in the air. “Read this part here!” I pointed to the lines where Gregor mentioned his leave—only those, as the rest were between me and my husband.

  “He’ll be here for Christmas…,” she said, almost in disbelief. She was eager for Joseph to come home so she could give him the good news.

  The uneasiness I had felt just minutes earlier was gone; happiness had drowned out every other possible emotion. I would take care of him. We would share a bed again, and I would hold him so close that he would no longer be afraid of anything.

  7

  Sitting around the hearth, we daydreamed about Gregor’s return. Joseph planned to kill a rooster for our Christmas dinner and I wondered whether I would have to eat at the lunchroom that day. What would Gregor do while I was at the barracks? I was jealous of the time Herta and Joseph would spend with him while I was gone.

  “Maybe he could come to Krausendorf. After all, he’s a soldier in the Wehrmacht.”

  “No,” Joseph told me, “the SS wouldn’t let him in.”

  We ended up talking about Gregor as a child. We often did. My mother-in-law told me that until he was sixteen he had been a slightly chubby boy.

  “He had red cheeks, even when he wasn’t running around. It often looked like he’d been drinking.”

  “Actually,” Joseph said, “he did get drunk once.”

  “Why, that’s right!” Herta exclaimed. “Oh, what memories you’ve made me recall.… Listen to this, Rosa. He might’ve been seven, no older than that. It was summer, we came back from the fields and found him lying right there on that chest.” She pointed at the wooden trunk by the wall. “He was so happy. ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘that juice you made is delicious.’”

  “On the table was an open bottle of wine,” Joseph said, “almost half empty. ‘Good god,’ I ask him, ‘why did you drink that?’ And he says, ‘Because I was really thirsty.’” Joseph laughed.

  So did Herta. She laughed herself to tears. Watching her arthritis-twisted hands wipe her eyes, I thought of all the times they had caressed Gregor when he awoke, had brushed his hair from his forehead as he ate breakfast—thought of all the times they had scrubbed every last inch of his filthy body when he returned in the evening, exhausted from his fierce battles at the edge of the marsh, a slingshot sticking out of his shorts pocket. All the times she had slapped him and then, sitting in her room, had wanted to cut off the hand that caused such disgrace—the disgrace of striking someone who was once you and was now another human being.

  “Then he grew up, grew tall, all at once,” Joseph said. “Sprouted up overnight, like he’d soaked his feet in water.”

  I imagined Gregor as a plant, a towering poplar tree, just like the ones lining the road to Krausendorf—wide, straight trunk; clear bark speckled with lenticels—and longed to embrace him.

  From then on I counted the days by crossing them off the calendar with X’s, each X shortening the wait by a little bit. To fill the time, I followed a self-imposed routine.

  In the afternoons, before getting back on the bus, I would go to the well with Herta to get water, and when I returned I fed the hens. I would leave the feed in the henhouse and they would rush over and peck at it, twitching anxiously. There was always one who couldn’t squeeze her way into the group and would lash her head left and right, wondering what to do, or maybe she would only do so in dismay. Her scrawny head was disconcerting to me. Letting out a deep belly-squawk, the hen would scurry around in search of a gap and then thrust herself between two of her companions, shoving one of them out of the way. With this, the balance of power would change again. There was food for all of them, but the hens never believed it.

  I would watch one of them laying an egg in her nest and would become hypnotized by her quivering beak, her neck jerking up, down, to one side, then the other. Suddenly the hen’s neck seemed to snap beneath a strangled screech that opened wide her beak and her round, emerald eyes. I wondered if she was screaming from pain, if she too had been condemned to painful childbirth, and what sin she might have committed. Or if just the opposite was true and they were cries of triumph. Every day the hens witnessed their own miracle, and I had never had even one.

  I once caught the youngest of them pecking an egg she had just laid and I almost kicked her. It was too late, though. She’d already eaten it.

  “She ate her own child,” I told Herta, shocked.

  She explained that it happened from time to t
ime. The hens accidentally broke an egg and instinctively tasted it. Since it was flavorsome, they consumed it all.

  In the lunchroom Sabine once told her sister Gertrude and Theodora about when her young son heard Hitler’s voice on the radio and was frightened. His chin had begun to quiver, dimples showing, and the boy had burst into tears. He’s our Führer, why are you crying? his mother had asked him. Besides, the Führer adores children, Theodora said.

  Germans love children. Hens, at times, eat their young. Living creatures appalled me. I had never been a good German.

  * * *

  ONE SUNDAY I went into the forest with Joseph to gather firewood. Among the trees, a symphony of birdsong. We brought the logs and branches back in a wheelbarrow to store them in the barn, which had once been used for animal feed. Gregor’s grandparents had farmed the land and raised cows and bulls, as had his great-grandparents, for that matter. Joseph had sold off everything to pay for Gregor’s education and had found a job as a gardener at the von Mildernhagen castle. Why did you do that? his son had asked him. We’re old now, anyway, Joseph replied, we don’t need much to live on. Gregor had no brothers or sisters. His mother had given birth to two other children but they had both died, and he’d never known them. He arrived by chance, when his parents were already resigned to the thought of growing old alone.

  The day Gregor announced he was going to study in Berlin, his father was openly disappointed. Not only had the son who had come to them so unexpectedly grown up all at once, overnight, but now he’d gotten it into his head to abandon them.

  “We quarreled,” Joseph admitted to me. “I couldn’t understand him. I was angry. I swore he would never leave, that I would never let him.”

  “Then what happened?” Gregor had never told me this story. “He didn’t run away from home, did he?”

  “He would never have done that.” Joseph stopped the wheelbarrow. He twisted his face into a grimace and rubbed his back.

  “Are you aching? Here, let me push it.”

  “I’m old,” he retorted, “but not that old!” He started moving again. “A teacher came to talk to us. Sat down at the table with Herta and me, said Gregor was a very good student, that he deserved it. The fact that a stranger knew my son better than me sent me into a fury. I was mad at that teacher, treated him rudely. Then, out in the cowshed, Herta made me come to my senses and I felt like a fool.”

  After the teacher’s visit, Joseph made the decision to sell off all the animals except the hens, and Gregor moved to Berlin.

  “He studied hard and got what he wanted: an excellent profession.”

  I pictured Gregor back at his office, sitting at the drafting machine, perched on his stool as he moved the scales over the paper and scratched his neck with a pencil. I liked to spy on him as he worked, spy on him whenever he was doing something and forgetting about what was around him, forgetting about me. Was he still himself when I wasn’t there?

  “If only he hadn’t gone off to war…” Joseph stopped again, not to rub his back. He stared into space without speaking, almost as though needing to go back over the events in his mind. He had done what was right for his son, but what was right hadn’t been enough.

  We stacked the firewood in the barn in silence. It wasn’t a sad silence. We often talked about Gregor, he was the only thing we had in common, but after talking about him we had to be quiet for a little while.

  When we stepped inside the house, Herta told us we were out of milk. I said I would go get more the next day. I had learned the way.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, the smell of manure told me I had arrived, well before I spotted the line of women holding empty glass bottles. I had brought a basket full of vegetables to barter.

  A loud moo echoed through the countryside like a cry for help, sounding like an air-raid siren, that same desperation. I was the only one startled by it. The other women inched forward, chatting with one another or standing in silence, holding their children by the hand or calling to them if they strayed.

  Two young women came out of the dairy. They looked familiar. When they were near I realized they were two of the other food tasters. One had short-cropped hair and dry facial skin, and was called Beate. The other had squeezed her bosom and broad hips into a brown coat and full skirt. Her face was a bas relief, her name Heike. On impulse I moved my arm to wave, but then froze. I didn’t know how secret our assignment was, whether we had to deny we knew one another. I wasn’t from their town and had never run into them at the dairy. Besides that, we had never had a real conversation in the lunchroom. Maybe saying hello was out of place, maybe they wouldn’t say hello back.

  They passed by without even looking my way. Beate’s eyes were red. Heike was telling her, “We can split this one, and next time you can give me a little of yours.”

  Eavesdropping on them embarrassed me. Beate couldn’t afford milk? We hadn’t been given our first payment yet, but we would be paid for our work—that was what the SS guards said, though they hadn’t specified how much. For a moment I doubted the two women were tasters, despite having seen them from close up. How could they not have recognized me? I followed them with my eyes, hoping they would turn around. They didn’t. They kept walking until they disappeared from sight, and a moment later it was my turn to go in.

  On the way home it began to pour. The water made my hair cling to my temples and drenched my coat. I shivered from the cold. Herta had warned me to take a mantle but I had forgotten. With my city shoes on, I risked tumbling into the mud. My view blurred by the lashing water, I could easily take the wrong road. Despite my heels, I began to run. Suddenly, not far from the church, I spotted the silhouette of two women walking arm in arm. I recognized them from Heike’s full skirt, or maybe from their backs, which my eyes observed in the lunchroom every day as we stood in line. If they spread out both their mantles all three of us would fit underneath. I called out to them. A clap of thunder drowned out my voice. I called out again. They didn’t look back. Maybe I was wrong, maybe it wasn’t them. Slowly I came to a halt and stood there in the rain.

  The next day, in the lunchroom, I sneezed.

  “Gesundheit,” someone to my right said.

  It was Heike. I was surprised to recognize her voice, though my view of her was blocked by Ulla, who was sitting between us.

  “Did you catch a chill yesterday too?”

  They had seen me, then.

  “Yes,” I replied, “I have a cold.”

  Hadn’t they heard me calling to them?

  “Warm milk with honey,” Beate said, almost as if she had waited for Heike’s approval before speaking to me. “If we had more milk than we knew what to do with, that would be our remedy.”

  * * *

  THE WEEKS PASSED and our suspicion of the food faded, as toward a suitor with whom you gradually grow more intimate. We women now feasted avidly, but immediately afterward our bloated bellies would curb our enthusiasm, the weight on our stomachs like a weight on our hearts. The hour following each banquet was filled with desperation.

  Each of us still feared we might be poisoned. It happened if a cloud suddenly darkened the high midday sun, it happened during those seconds of confusion that often come right before dusk. And yet none of us could hide the comfort given to us by the Griessnockerlsuppe, with those semolina dumplings that melted in our mouths, or our total devotion to Eintopf, despite the fact that we missed pork and beef and even chicken. But Hitler refused to eat meat, and on the radio he encouraged his citizens to have vegetable stew at least once a week. He thought it was easy to find vegetables in the city during the war. Either that or it was none of his concern; Germans didn’t die of hunger, and if they died they were bad Germans.

  I thought of Gregor and would touch my belly, now that it was full and there was nothing left to be done. Spare me until Christmas, at least until Christmas, I would repeat to myself, my legs trembling, and with my finger I would secretly draw a sign of the cross in the spot where my
esophagus ended—or at least where I thought it did, imagining the inside of my body as a cluster of gray puzzle pieces like the ones I had seen depicted in Krümel’s books.

  From the outside, covered with clothes, my body didn’t seem different. But I felt my hips spread out until they brushed against my forearms when I sat down, and when I stood up, my thighs stiffened with the arrogance of new, strengthened muscles. My ribs didn’t press against my skin anymore and my round face, Herta said, had regained its color. The Führer’s food had changed my appearance, had transformed us all.

  Maybe for this reason, the tears gradually started to seem pathetic to everyone, even to Leni. If her panic rose I would squeeze her hand, stroke her blotchy cheeks. Elfriede never cried. During the hour-long wait I would listen to her noisy breathing. When something distracted her, her face would forget its harshness and she became pretty. Beate chewed with the same fervor she would have used to scrub bedsheets. Heike, her next-door neighbor since they’d been little girls—Leni had told me that—was seated across from her, and she cut her trout in butter and parsley with her left hand, raising her elbow until it bumped into Ulla’s arm. Not even noticing, Ulla continued to lick the corners of her mouth. It must have been that childish gesture, repeated distractedly, that sent the SS guards into ecstasy.

  I would study the food in the others’ dishes, and the woman who happened to have been served the same food as me that day would become dearer to me than a close relative. My heart was suddenly touched by the sight of the pimple that had formed on her cheek, by the energy or indolence with which she washed her face in the morning, by the pillings on the old wool stockings she might put on before getting into bed. Her survival was as important to me as my own, because we shared the same fate.